These are the new secrets of leadership success in a digital age, but, then again, this is also exactly what Christopher Columbus did, Vasco da Gama did, Henry Hudson did! For that matter, so did George Custer.

Heroes all, no doubt! But one was killed by the people he was looking for (Custer); one was abandoned by his team and left to die (Hudson); one found the wrong people, in the wrong place, called them by the wrong name, and never knew it (Columbus) and one returned having lost at least half his original crew, and then went on to a career that distinguished itself in mayhem and murder (da Gama). On such exploits, so our history was built.

What do all of these “heroes” have in common? They were all “discoverers.” They knew exactly what they were looking for, what they would find, and were possessed by such a high level of certainty about what they knew that they never asked the important questions that might have saved them from their eventual fates. The 20th century American historian Daniel J. Boorstin spoke of such discoverers as being finders: “[They] show us what [they] already knew was there”, and, while they may be necessary for succeeding in the present, this might not be the leadership style to take us into the future. Read more

Hang around with executives in industries as diverse as: automobiles, book publishing, telecom networks, wrist-watches, personal computers, digital cameras, postal services, cigarettes, credit cards, smartphones, steam-irons, oil & gas and even laundromats (among many others) and you’ll undoubtedly hear reference to their determination to avoid what has come to be known as “Kodak moments,” or instances of catastrophic disruption of industry incumbents. What a mistake! Not only are their industries as they know them in serious danger of disappearing, but they are trying to build a strategy by relying upon a metaphor that never really existed. How unfortunate a decision-making situation is that! Read more

We don’t fail enough; we need to fail faster, fail bigger, fail more often; convince our leaders that failure is acceptable. It’s almost as if we are saying that: “if only we were more accomplished failers, we could create miracles!” Read more

At a time when the world economy keeps flirting with limits to growth over the continued depletion of seemingly finite resources, the one infinite resource that undoubtedly holds the potential breakthroughs for greater global growth -- human talent -- remains significantly undervalued and relatively underexploited [in the best sense of the term]. [1] The real energy crisis today is in ideas and creativity, rather than petroleum, and yet we steadfastly continue to ensnare talented people, and their ideas, in organizational cages that were built in periods of capital- and labor-intensity, and which were designed for command and control, rather than liberation and excellence. The results, worldwide: great people achieving mediocre results. What an extraordinary waste!